The present invention relates to load dependent analyzing optical components, in particular to interferometric phase measurement of passive and active optical components.
Optical networks operating at highest bit-rates, e.g. 40 Gb/s, impose increasingly stronger requirements on the dispersion properties of all involved network elements. This implies that passive and active optical components or devices need to be characterized, in particular in terms of group delay and differential group delay. Active components can be optical fiber amplifiers, such as erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), TDFA, OFA, optical wave guide amplifiers, such as EDWA, semi-conductor amplifiers, such as SOA, and hybrid devices. Major component parameters of active devices are gain and noise figure. These parameters can be measured by indirect principles such as time-domain extinction method, signal substitution and interpolation with signal subtraction and other direct principles such as dynamic gain and noise gain profile. Passive optical devices and their dispersion relevant phase properties can be measured by modulation phase shift methods, differential phase shift methods and interferometric methods.